join me on the stupid grail-quest thing if you don’t want to.”
She sat beside me on the bed helping secure the bandages and adjust the sling. “No, I think it’s important. Like you said, we need to stop being so—single-minded. What you’re doing matters to us as well as to you. I’d like to be part of it.”
While I had a lot of extremely damaging personality flaws, I was at least generally able to take yes for an answer. I stopped talking. We breakfasted as I’d got used to breakfasting, although after Dr Bright’s text last night a tiny part of me was missing Elise’s coffee-and-banana morning routine. Or rather, missing the coffee and guiltily not missing the banana. Because seriously, fuck bananas.
But they are a good source of potassium, Miss Kane.
The four of us—me, Tara, Sofia, and Flick—gathered in the courtyard. I was strongly in favour of Sofia and Flick staying behind but Sofia had made a case that if we were going off on the last stage of a woobly vision quest it made sense to bring the prophet, and where she went, Flick went. Perhaps it was all the grail talk, but the whole mission had a weirdly ominous vibe to it. Like Hugo Weaving was going to pop up any second and be all and you shall be called the Fellowship of Patrick’s Girlfriend or something.
“So—” I began, not entirely sure where to go from there. “This is your last chance to back out. It’s going to be an annoyingly long trip and might be a total waste of everybody’s time. Also we might all get killed.”
Flick gave me a nervous look. She was a good deal less flirty these days and I was definitely putting not fucking her into my good decisions box. “How are we getting there? And where is there exactly?”
“There,” said Tara, “is a house overlooking Lake Windermere. And how is the Shadow.”
The way Flick’s nose wrinkled when she was confused reminded me of Sofia. “Is this a magic thing?”
A sleek black car pulled around from the side of the building, like a ghost from the days when automobile companies still thought it was a good idea to put tiny statues on the hood at ideal pedestrian-impaling height.
“It does have a certain magic to it, yes,” mused Tara as the chauffeur got out and opened the passenger doors for us. Then, to my dismay, she settled in behind the steering wheel.
“Tell me you’re not driving?”
She glanced at me, half hurt, half playful. “This might be dangerous, and I won’t have Henderson risking himself on my account. Besides, it’s been ages since I took the shad out for a spin.”
“Yeah, that’s not filling me with confidence. I’ve seen you behind the wheel. You’re the fucking worst.”
“I’m an excellent driver.”
She was, to be fair. But that was the problem; like most things she was good at, she did it with reckless abandon. “Oh please, I’ve seen seventeen-year-olds with more self-control.”
“Too late. We’re leaving.” We manoeuvred quite sedately out of the courtyard, down the long driveway to the road, and into the narrow tangle of country lanes that made up the approach to Safernoc. It was about here that we started to pick up speed, and I tried to tell myself that it was just the closeness of the trees and that classic car vibe that made it seem like we were going far quicker than we actually were but, no, we were being driven way too quickly by a woman who loved the thrill of the chase and was confident that a devastating road accident probably wouldn’t kill her. I had to seriously reconsider dating near-impervious women or, at the very least, reconsider letting them drive me places.
By the time we hit the M40 she’d stopped pretending speed limits were something she cared about. Probably best if I didn’t think about it. “I don’t suppose”—I craned my head over my shoulder and tried to catch Sofia’s eye. She and Flick were flopped against one another in a platonically supportive bundle on the back seat—“that you have any last minute prophetic insights into how this all might go down, do you?”
“Sorry.” Sofia looked genuinely apologetic. “But that might be a positive. I didn’t get a dire warning saying don’t. Although I’ve been doing a bit of research and a lot of the original Delphic prophecies were ambiguous, so even if I had more control I’m not sure how much good I’d be.”